There’s a ton of stuff going on in the world of intellectual property; from Steve Jobs’ “anti-DRM” letter to the whole Google slugfest which ranges from “Google versus Viacom” to “Google loves pirates”. There’s just too much to cover (though I did weigh in on the “Universal pwns Bolt.com” situation this morning while my site was down). Instead, I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to something I found rather funny: Seth Godin is asking people to NOT buy a book he licensed using Creative Commons (Link). Turns out he chose the wrong option and now some small company is making money off of his “ideavirus” by using the CC license as intended. Godin is trying to now somehow bring trademark issues into it along with… get this… ethics; as if the people sharing extremist views on either side of this polarizing issue has any of those left.

I’d read about this company, EoPlex, last year but don’t recall mentioning anything here. They’ve popped up again (Link) and I figure I’ll go ahead and just post a quick note; what they do is interesting but not, afaik, all that proprietary. From the PR funding announcement on their site (Link) I’ve culled a concise explanation of what this company does: Continue reading →

There’s been some talk about “reverse product placement” (a phrase with which I take issue – reLink), so I assume there’s a “forward” product placement. Question now is whether there’s a “neutral”, since Toyota’s Scion brand is reported by Reuters – via C|Net (Link) – to be launching a couple of new cars simultaneously at both the real life Chicago Auto Show and inside the Second Life virtual world. This raises some issues. For example, how many real cars will drive interest in the virtual cars? Where is the fiction of traditional product placement when the virtual world is not perceived as fiction by the users? A brand that exists only inside a movie is not fiction to the characters in that movie. And now we have technology that permits a perspective that is similar to those characters. Yet this shift in viewpoint goes unacknowledged.
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This is may not seem appropriate fodder for this blog, but I can’t think of anything more transreal than news of what’s being reported by the New York Times (Link – registration probably required). Here’s a clip from the relatively short article which hopefully is enough to get you to read the whole piece:

In a quantum mechanical sleight of hand, Harvard physicists have shown that they can not only bring a pulse of light, the fleetest of nature’s particles, to a complete halt, but also resuscitate the light at a different location and let it continue on its way.

Awesome.

Anyone else feeling like they’ve not made good use of their brain?

There’s been a bit of hype around a new “rollable” electronic display being used in a device called Readius (Link). It’s from a company called Polymer Vision, “the rollable display company” and a division of Philips according to what I just read on C|Net (Link). I first saw this device yesterday on the Open the Future blog (Link) but didn’t understand how it actually worked; seemed a little boxy and I was expecting something with a cylindrical form at least somewhere in the design. Now that I’ve seen the animation on their site (Link), I’m less impressed. When someone says “rollable”, I want rollable. This is an unfolding, flexible display. Still cool, but they’ve made it less cool and disappointed me by raising expectation and not delivering on the promise.

Oh well. Next.

{Image Copyright (c) 2005-2007 Polymer Vision}